Over the Moon with Actress and Author Sonya Walger

You may know her as Penny Widmore on Lost or the iconic Molly Cobb on For All Mankind, but I know Sonya Walger as a dear friend from our days on HBO's Mind of the Married Man, and now, as one of my new favorite authors. Her debut novel Lion earned worldwide praise, and her highly anticipated second novel Wifehouse drops April 8th. I am over the moon to welcome Sonya to the podcast.

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Lies My Vagina Told Me is hosted by Brigitte Bako. Produced by Jacques Thelemaque and Leah Sherman. Theme music by Jack Morer at balletguitar.com

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:09

Welcome back to another episode of Lies My Vagina Told Me. Today, ladies and gentlemen, you are in for a treat. You know my next guest as Penny Winmore on Lost and as the fierce Molly Cobb on For All Mankind. But I first knew her on our HBO show, Mind of the Married Man, where this barely spelling Canadian fell hopelessly in awe with a brilliant British Argentinian intellect who studied literature at Oxford. And since then, she's not only become one of the most compelling actresses working today, she's become one of my favorite writers. Her debut novel, Lion, is exquisite and wrecked me in the best way possible. And her latest wife house is equally mesmerizing. Please welcome my wildly talented, intimidatingly brilliant and deeply beloved friend, Miss Sonia Walger. Yay! I did it! Thank you. You did it. You got through it.

SPEAKER_00 1:10

And I wish you would just launch me into every room I ever walk into.

SPEAKER_01 1:13

Brian, I can just come to auditions with you and meetings and just say, this is how fucking brilliant my my amazing my amazing friend is. Thank you so much for doing this podcast. I'm so proud of you on every fucking level. Every level. And you know, I want to talk, of course, I we're here to talk about these amazing novels that you've written, but just to just sum up what was going on after we did Mind of the Married Man many years ago, I went off to make my TV show G-Spot for roughly my seven Canadian cousins, and you went off to do some of the most fucking iconic television in the world, culminating. Do I have this right? With your episode of Lost, The Constance being voted one of the greatest scenes in television history?

SPEAKER_00 2:09

What? Yeah, then no, this is an impossible thing, but listen, I I love a list if I'm number one on it. So I'm otherwise I hate lists, and that's so absurd and ridiculous, and who would make a list? Nevertheless, when you are number one on a list, you grow to love that list. So, yes, Vulture, God bless them, uh made a list of the hundred best episodes of television ever. And it I say my episode because it's a two-hander, so I have to say my episode. Our episode of Lost is number one. The constant is the number one episode. But like over and over for years. Yes, it keeps coming up. Anyway, listen, let's not say it too loudly because they'll definitely rewrite the list and something will go.

SPEAKER_01 2:53

So it's I mean, I know I'm on some lists. But that that is not one of them. That is not one of them. Okay. And then let's just talk for a second about fucking Molly Cobbs. You know, I was re-watching some scenes last night. She's just so brilliant and badass. Did you love making that show? Was it crazy difficult?

SPEAKER_00 3:13

That show. That show was an absolute career highlight. I mean, to get to play the first woman on the moon, like I just feel I feel a little bit as though I actually was the first woman on the moon. Yeah. Just because you're that good. You're that good. So, you know, the fact that we've only put 16 white men up there, but that there have been no women, um, I just felt like, sure, I'll I'll be the first, first woman. So yeah, I loved that role. There was a time where I was swinging from a rope at the top of a 60-foot polystyrene moon crater, and and I was tired, and I'm sitting on a rope, and I'm sitting on a stool that isn't really a stool, it's like a pen with with a small cushion balanced off it. Yes. And um, and there's no there's no getting me so much as you know a protein bar up there because I'm so high up. And I just had someone said something like, 'Did you ever imagine yourself doing this?' And I was like, 'Dude, you know what I'm not?' I'm not in a pencil skirt with a clipboard of someone how they died. Like, I'm not, I'm not at the bottom of the stairs yelling up as a soccer mum to see if my kids late for school. I'm playing the first woman on the moon. I am just so happy right now.

SPEAKER_01 4:29

It's pretty amazing. And I've been re-watching it, and it just holds up as it was so shocking and amazing. I remember like the twist in the pilot, and it just was so absolutely incredible. I mean, you've really gotten to play a lot of amazing roles since we left this set of Mind of the Married Man. I must say, I loved Mind of the Married Man. I mean, I love the experience. I made great friends out of it, and it prompted me to write my show because uh it was my first comedy because nobody fucking thought I was funny. I was like rape, bludgeoned, and killed in everything I've ever done. And somebody said you're funny. And then the entire time I just cried with good hair. And I thought, I think I can fucking write something a little better for myself than this. So it did inspire me. And I I bumped into Taylor Nichols. I bumped into him. He was in a friend's short the other day and he sends his love. He asked about you, and I told him that you're the most brilliant, brilliant writer on planet Earth. Uh, I want to say one thing. Between all these TV shows, and then when you started writing, you in fact yourself uh had your own podcast called Bookish, right? And I'd love to hear about it. I want to know if you used it in the same way that I'm using this to completely avoid writing my book. This is more just putting it off a little bit longer. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 5:55

It wasn't conscious. I didn't consciously do it for that. I did it because basically I couldn't believe that I'd married someone that didn't read. It was really that. It was just I looked across at my wonderful, amazing husband and was like, Jit, you don't you don't read books. This is awful.

SPEAKER_01 6:12

Like Because he's too busy writing hit television shows. That does happen to the brain.

SPEAKER_00 6:16

No, no, no. Listen, there's no judgment. It he just doesn't, I don't play instruments and he's an amazing musician. Like we all made our trade-offs.

SPEAKER_01 6:23

Now that I think.

SPEAKER_00 6:24

But um I I just missed having someone to talk to about great, great books. And so I invented bookish where I talked to people about the five books that had influenced the most. Um, not their favorite ones, not the ones they always recommend, but the ones that were like that had changed them in some seminal way. So it was really fun. It became a kind of stealth way to talk to people about their lives because invariably people picked books from different moments in their lives. So it was this completely underhand sort of biography show, but but it was it was me it was amazing. I loved it. And like you, I discovered very quickly how much work it is because you've got to procure all the guests. You gotta, in my case, uh, you gotta read the books so they can read the books. You gotta chase up with their agents and their assistants and their managers. And did they get the link and the I know, baby.

SPEAKER_01 7:18

It's really like I thought this would be easier than television production. I'm not sure it is. No, I'm not sure it is. But I am enjoying it, and I do get to read people's amazing books. And I will say, I too I read books, but I had an issue finishing books. Even if I love them, I think I don't like endings or something. And I have a very distracted brain lately. And Lion, your first novel, I I want to say, when you gave it to me, I think I read it in a night and a half. I was so madly in love with this book. Please tell me, like, from bookish to working on all these shows, that's my dog barking. Delilah mommy making history. From from bookish to working on all these iconic TV shows, what did it take to sit tush in chair and actually start this book?

SPEAKER_00 8:13

Um, it took a global pandemic. So if you just sit tight and wait for another one of those. Yeah, it did, it did. It took uh it took, well, I suppose heartbreakingly, it took my dad dying and all the stories that my dad represented and lived that were so insane and so outlandish and so um, you know, i iconic and and extraordinary. Um it took him dying and me realizing that my children who were very young at the time were never gonna know their grandfather and that they really weren't gonna know these stories because my memory is so fucking terrible that I was lucky to remember like four of them, and there were so many. So so I'd already sort of thought I really need to write, I really need to write papa down for Billy and Jake to have him. And so I'd scribbled some stuff, and then I was or I I am a really big journal keeper. So I'd kept all these journals over the years, and I and then COVID came and there was nothing else to do. It was that or or scream at my children some more. And so I was like, okay, stop with the screaming at my children in the afternoons. In the afternoons, everyone gets a break. You guys can bl watch TV till your eyes bleed, and I will try writing this book. And so it began with that. It began, I went to my old journals, I started sort of harvesting them, I started writing down what I could remember, and then I started incorporating what it was to sort of be in this strange moment in time where all we had was each other. Well, all we had were these conversations, either with ourselves or with in my case, my mom on the phone, or with my past self, sort of revisiting these journals. So I just sort of started uh feeling like if we only had you, we just had this time that all we had really were conversations, and we either had long and involved conversations with our friends, or not either we we all did, I think, or with our family, and I did all of that and and revisited my sort of past self in my journals, and from all of that emerged Lion. And so when it was done, I felt like, well, this is I did what I set out to do. I I wrote a thing that I my children one day maybe will will have as this memory of him, but also a snapshot of who their mother was at this moment and why I am the the mother I am because of the way I was parented to some degree. So um anyway, that was the that was the birth of Lion, and and it really was. I've said this before, but I really mean it. You know, if if Lion had ended up being just a Word document on my desktop, I was okay with that. I really didn't I did it.

SPEAKER_01 11:07

I understand that I had such a connection to this book because it's based on your brilliant father, larger than life father, that I was lucky enough to meet in this lifetime. Because you and I were planning a trip to Argentina, and then you got a job, and I went by myself, and you had your entire Argentinian family come take care of me and engulf me in love and ice cream and french fries and trips, and and I got to meet your papa before he passed, not too, not too long before he passed, and he was everything you describe and so charming and so beautiful. I mean, he was a skydiver, a race car driver, a bon vivant, a playboy, a he was in everything. And I had been hearing stories and hearing stories and hearing stories, and then to get to meet him along with the rest of the family, because the way they do it in Argentina, I've never seen it anywhere. When I would meet one of your cousins for lunch, 14 people showed me. I mean, it was a nine-hour lunch, and it there was always ice cream. I who knew? I holy fuck. It was it was one of the greatest trips that I had taken. And so when I read this book, because I felt so part of it because I knew your stories from that time of growing up, and then I knew you many years ago, and it it just I just I wept, I loved every every second of it, and then lo and behold, she writes this other book, and it's not based on anybody I know. You have come up with this story, and I thought, will I be pulled into it the same way? Because I felt like a part of the other one, and it was tell us tell our audience what Wife House is about because it was absolutely incredible.

SPEAKER_00 12:51

Thank you. Um yeah, Wife House is is uh is pure fiction. It it was inspired by uh two friends, um, but it's a a work of complete fiction. Um it's about a woman who is married with two children and lives uh upstate rural Connecticut, and she's Australian, and she has been in this marriage and in this family for a long time, and she starts an affair, and um it is the evolution of this woman and this affair, and it is the dissolution of a family. Takes place in the space of a calendar year, so you begin on Christmas Day and you end the following Christmas Day. Um there are parallels that I won't ruin for people as to what what happens and where she begins and where she ends. But um in essence what I wanted to do was look at why a woman might leave her family, choose to leave. Um I think we are conditioned and used to talking about men doing.

SPEAKER_01 14:05

Men do it, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 14:06

And um and men do it and we roll our eyes and we call it a midlife crisis, and women do it and they leave their children, and it is an act that goes against nature. And we, you know, historically through literature, we have punished our women who've done this. We Madame Bevery, you know, takes arsenic and d um Anna Karanina jumps in front of a train. Sorry, she's spoilers for you. But these are like Nora in a doll's house is banished from society. Like over and over and over, these women are not um allowed to continue existing after they make a choice like this. So I wanted to write a book that took this incredibly difficult decision and looked at it from all the points of view. So the book is told from everyone's point of view. You move each chapter moves you through another perspective. So you're with the wife, the husband, the lover, the children, the best friend. You keep moving through time and you keep holding this prism up and just shifting it a little bit.

SPEAKER_01 15:11

That was what was so extraordinary is seeing it from I've never seen a book like that, seeing it from every single person, including the young children's point of view and the lover's point of view, and the husband's point of view. It's it's and the friends, because everybody's affected in some I've been through things where friends have divorced and one had an affair and we knew about it, and it's so it's so difficult for the friends too, because you have to fucking choose. And it but I'll tell you something like look, I think about uh leaving this Hollywood Wood Hills life and and starting all again and not leaving a forwarding address somewhere in Italy. I think a lot of women fantasize about just starting all over. Yeah, much I I just have a hairy child that came out of my uterus, but much harder when you actually have uh the real children. But I think this book is gonna make women just really fucking think about it because um many struggle with not changing their lives when they need to. But it's it's um I mean, because I know you have this blessed, gorgeous, amazing family, and to come up with that sort of subject matter, I guess it had to do with your father was not there all the time, but he was fabulous and amazing and was given sort of granted permission to just go off and be that person, and women never are. Yeah, always different.

SPEAKER_00 16:34

Yeah, totally. And you know, I think it's weird. I I was deep into book two before I realized that I was yet again writing a book about a parent who leaves. Like I hadn't hadn't made the connection. No, I hadn't realized, and I think in some way I needed to write the counterpart to to it. And I it wasn't conscious at all. Really? Yeah. I really, really wasn't. But I I look back and I think, oh wow, yeah, I I guess I guess that was the ballast that I had to do in order to balance this thing out.

SPEAKER_01 17:07

Um when does this book come out? It's very soon. In is it April 7th?

SPEAKER_00 17:14

7th, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:15

April 7th. So we're catching you a week before so that everybody can go run and get this book. And you know, in the world of all the things that you do, is there one like if if you could just write? I know you're starting to work on a third, correct? Oh my god, you're so ahead of me. I am giving away all my funny stories for free. I don't know if that's a good idea. But uh it's incredible, it's incredible. I've been in a memoir class because I want to write a funny memoir. This is really just what this is. This is in podcast form. This is it, it's fantastic. And then that's it.

SPEAKER_00 17:58

Really?

unknown 18:00

What the fuck?

SPEAKER_00 18:01

Save yourself typing. Save yourself the typing. Get Chat GPT to write you the transcript of every single one of these episodes, and then you start editing. You pull out your guests, and you go back in for you, and with a highlighter, you're gonna start doing it. Oh, my story. Harvesting your own thoughts because you've already laid half of them out, and you're too hilarious and too great. So that's how you're gonna begin it, and then you're gonna thank me in the afterward.

SPEAKER_01 18:27

I will because they can probably spell a lot better than me. I became my Czechoslovakian parents. I just there was no vowels. Um, thank you. Look at you. You're constantly giving lessons. Um, okay, but if you do you still want to do it all? Do you still have the fantasy to do it all? Because I want to write a book and then save some zebras and take them to a villa. That's pretty I'm good with that. But do you still want to act and do you still want to you know?

SPEAKER_00 18:52

Well, you know, I I feel uh I feel about the acting thing, it just feels like sh sure, if you want to come and find me and dust me off and wheel me out somewhere within a 25 mile radius of Los Angeles. Yeah. I'm I'm I'm available for that. Do I want to to to jump through all the hoops and tape and stand on a hill and throw it into the darkness and never hear from it again? I do not. I do not miss it. I don't I don't I don't at all. I I mean I really do look back feeling like if listen, if Molly Cobb was my last role, I went out and high. It's kind of downhill from being in a guess.

SPEAKER_01 19:35

Well, my high I was 20 and it was Scorsese and it was downhill from there. So But Molly Cobb's, yeah, I mean like I do too. I mean, I feel like again, if it happens great, I get asked all the time and then they fall apart or whatever, and I just I'm not sure how lighting is gonna work at 58 and a half. I left acting at 41, seemed like a really good idea. I'm like, really? You did it then? But I actually I really do. I think podcast is a lot of work, but I am fascinated by it. I recently had a pitch, I used to pitch 10 times a week for television, and and this podcast is also like I TV development is very fucking different than it used to be. It's so long. You can grow a third tit, it just takes forever. And I had a pitch and I hadn't had one almost in a year. And the difference was I was on with somebody from Hulu, uh, they were like, I watched four of your podcasts right before the pitch. So there's something like, because they always go, What you been doing? And where have you been? And it's like, I've been walking my dog around a mountain. That and so there's something very immediate about it. Like if they want to know what you look like or sound like or what your sense of humor is like. So I do find it interesting. All the books I've read from the people that have come on, so fascinating. And I'm learning, like, look what I learned from you today. I th that doesn't intimidate me. I'm like, I could do that. Yeah. I could do that. I went for the first time because I was not emotionally prepared. I went recently for the first time for a drive through the Palisades and through Malibu, and it's already, I know, on on the upswing and it's green and it's coming back, but I wept. I wept. And I don't know many people who have lost everything, but I went to your book reading of Lion and it had just sort of happened a few months before. Three weeks. Three weeks before. I might start crying. Three weeks before, and I've been to this beautiful home that you made with your husband, nothing left. You lost it. How you know, what does it teach you? What because I'll tell you, I was in Venice, Italy, with my dog, as one is, when the fires started, and I was so panicked, I was getting calls from people evacuating that I had left my cell phone in the Uber. So I went to Italy without a cell phone. Phone, which might be the greatest thing you could do. Yeah, friends. And and my best friend was at the house and he said, We're gonna have to evacuate. At one point, they thought Laurel Canyon would evacuate. And he said, What do you what do I get? What do I grab? What do I what do you want? And I and I'm a big collector and I have I have a first dib addiction. And and I thought my mum's scarf. It came down to the simplest thing of our history and and comfort. It wasn't any fucking piece of art or i it wasn't any of that. And so how do you survive and thrive something like this? I mean your journals, did your journals burn?

SPEAKER_00 22:43

Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank God it was already thank God I'd already made Lion, because otherwise Lion would be eleven pages long.

SPEAKER_01 22:52

Because that's what you would have remembered.

SPEAKER_00 22:54

I understand. I know in the very immediate thing and the thing of you know what we said to the children the next day when we had to tell them that the house was gone, you know, we We all got into one bed in the hotel room and we just I got them under the sheets and I held them really tight and I said, Everything that matters is under this sheet. Everything that matters.

SPEAKER_01 23:17

What matters is is you have it all under the sheet. It's so fucking true. Um can you give us any tidbits on the newest, or it's too soon?

SPEAKER_00 23:29

Oh my god, this new book is kicking my ass, man. Each one is so different. You it's like having three different children. It really is. It's like it's the same parents every time, and yet they are different human rights. And book three is like, wow, it's its own thing. It's period, it's set between the wars, it's about a young woman who becomes a writer even though she doesn't really want to because she meets Virginia Wolf. It's a comedy. My funny, funny listen. This is a scoop. You heard it here fast.

SPEAKER_01 24:02

Uh this is a scoop. Um, thank you so much for sharing that. Because sometimes when I'm mid-project, I don't uh like to talk about it. But I will tell you the title of my latest. It's called Anticlimactic. And the tagline is She's Lost Her Youth, Her Job, and Her Orgasm. But it's not all bad. But thank you so much. Um I adore you. And one of the things, I'll tell you one of the lies that my vagina has told me with regards to people that I I fucking adore. I think when women don't have kids and their friends go off and have a family and you'll just keep birthing puppies, you think, oh, we won't still have all this stuff in common because they they're going to make these these amazing humans. And I really I think I did that. I stepped back a bit because you were in family mode and I was still, I don't know what I was traveling the world doing crazy things. But I have, as I've told you, I have missed you, that you are just always been so, so dear to my heart, and I follow your career and your literary career. I mean, I'm not I'm not surprised by it because you were always so brilliant, but it's surprisingly brilliant. Like how great these books are that I, with very, very busy small attention span, especially in the last few years, I couldn't put these books down. I bought a special light because I love the tub. I bought my special light, and your book is very waterlogged. I'm so sorry. I will buy my new copy. I love it. But everybody run out to get this book, April 7th, Wife House, by the brilliant and amazing Sonia Walger. Is there nothing you can't do, my friend?

SPEAKER_00 25:44

So many things, but thank you. Thank you for all of it. Thank you for reading. Thank you for reaching out. Thank you for being such a loyal and supportive friend. And thank you for making this fucking hilarious podcast that I look forward to every week.

SPEAKER_01 25:56

Thank you so much. My guest that is airing this week is the 14th-time nude tennis champion of the world. I tried to get Halle Berry, but sometimes it's better when you don't. We are having fun, and thank you for teaching me how to put all these stories into a book because that's what that's what this little experiment was about. And you've made this so easy. And thank you. And I will be there at your book sign. Thank you. I will not fucking miss it, and I I cannot tell my uh audience enough how what a wonderful, brilliant, compelling writer, and person and actress, and I'm glad the funny is coming because you're funny as shit, lady. You're funny in space and you're funny here. Thank you so much. You made this easy. I was so nervous because I wanted to do a fucking good job for you because I killed it, darling.

SPEAKER_00 26:47

You killed it. It's great. You're so good at this. You're so good at this. You really, really are, and I really mean it.

SPEAKER_01 26:53

Lessons in life, love, arithmetic, and literature. I can't thank you enough. Um I will see you on April 8th at Diesel. Yeah. Eighth at Diesel for your book reading. I love you. Thank you for coming on. It's a treat for everybody. Kisses, kisses, kisses. Thank you, darling. Lives My Vagina Told Me is hosted by Moi Bridget Bacon, produced by Jacques Telemac and Leia Sherman. Artwork by Leia Sherman, theme and original music by Jack Moore from balladguitar.com. See you next time on Lives My Vagina Told Me